The inventive concepts disclosed herein relate to systems and methods for providing user-configurable aircraft status displays by which aircraft fleet operations and maintenance personnel may be easily able to monitor the operational fleets under their control to quickly determine a flight status of a particular asset based on a condition represented by one or more displayed attributes.
Air travel worldwide continues to be a preferred mode of transport for business travelers, and for those traveling for pleasure and/or convenience. Air transport has also become a main artery by which to support ever-increasing tonnage of bulk cargo transport responding to scheduled and on-demand requirements. Airlines, other commercial passenger air carriers, and commercial air freight carriers all operate according to fairly rigid operating schedules in order that the facilities (including terminals) and infrastructure (including the air traffic control structure) that support regional, national and global air transport do not become overburdened, even in the most densely populated areas and along the along the most densely traveled air routes. The system that ensures a constant flow of passengers and freight between destinations, including meeting intermediate connections according to an organized process, is at once fairly robust, and yet fairly inflexible in its ability to deal with disruption.
For those aspects of their operations over which the air carriers may exercise control, it is in their best interest from a business perspective, including for passenger and/or customer satisfaction, to provide what operational flexibility they can in order to be able to react to such controllable factors as equipment non-availability due to malfunctions, and aircrew non-availability due to delays and other human factors. In the increasingly competitive market for an increasing share of the overall passenger miles (or cargo miles) traveled every year, it is generally the airline, or other air carrier, that can minimize an effect of any disruptions on its schedule that will prevail.
A capacity to account for all potential disruptions must be balanced, however, with any particular air carrier's need to operate its overall business structure most efficiently. In this regard, the air carrier's decisions regarding providing spare equipment and additional aircrew at different terminals throughout its network of supported air routes must be well-informed and appropriate. There is limited flexibility to provide redundancy in a cost-effective manner.
The requirement to be responsive to all contingencies in equipment and/or personnel failures that lead to delays and other disruptions in service, present a significant challenge. In the face of such a challenge, air carriers increasingly rely on technology to provide alerts in communications regarding potential delays, as well as reasons for those delays. Early identification and recognition of some circumstance, or set of circumstances, that may ultimately lead to disruption of a single flight, which generally cascades in its effect on multiple connecting flights, or that may disrupt operations at a particular terminal, becomes of increasing importance. The earlier that a particular air carrier's operations or maintenance divisions may be alerted to the presence of some difficulty may allow for the air carrier to more quickly respond to the occurrence in order ultimately to avoid, or at least mitigate, the schedule disruption. Additional or substitute equipment (aircraft) may be placed in service and/or re-located more quickly, and spare or substitute aircrew may be more quickly contacted in order to respond.
According to the above, air carriers are increasingly interested in obtaining and optimizing real-time access to information regarding a status of the aircraft in their fleet, or at least a subset of the aircraft in their fleet for a particular regional area, geographic location, and/or air terminal facility, even while still airborne. In like manner, air terminal facilities and other air carrier support entities benefit from increased access to such information as well. The air carriers believe that increasing their access to readily-available real-time aircraft status information will enhance their overall operational performance. The challenge is that the air carriers do not currently possess the real-time readily-available capacity to display high fidelity information including the necessary information by which to provide the desired real-time insight into certain attributes that the individual air carriers, or departments within the individual air carriers, may want to particularly track in support of the overall information exchange objectives.